Updated 2:45 pm, Friday, March 10, 2017

Merideth Canham-Nelson and Chris Nelson with beer from the Speakeasy Brewery.

Merideth Canham-Nelson and Chris Nelson with beer from the Speakeasy Brewery.

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Speakeasy Brewery pints.

Speakeasy Brewery pints.

Photo: Instagram

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Speakeasy down in Bayview announced its closure on Friday, March 10.

Speakeasy down in Bayview announced its closure on Friday, March 10.

Photo: @stellaa_rt, Instagram

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Speakeasy

Speakeasy

Photo: Brian Stechschulte/ Speakeasy

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Philippe Cloutier and Chris Devlin drink beer the Speakeasy Brewery during the San Francisco Beer Festival on Friday Feb. 13, 2009 in San Francisco.

Philippe Cloutier and Chris Devlin drink beer the Speakeasy Brewery during the San Francisco Beer Festival on Friday Feb. 13, 2009 in San Francisco.

Photo: Mike Kepka, The Chronicle

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Merideth and Chris Nelson, a couple from Monterey who spent 2008 attending a different beer festival each month for all twelve months in different parts of the world, stand for a portrait with beer from the Speakeasy Brewery on Friday Feb. 13, 2009 in San Francisco. less

Merideth and Chris Nelson, a couple from Monterey who spent 2008 attending a different beer festival each month for all twelve months in different parts of the world, stand for a portrait with beer from the ... more

Photo: Mike Kepka, The Chronicle

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Speakeasy Brewery

Speakeasy Brewery

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San Francisco's Speakeasy brewery to cease operations

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San Francisco brewery Speakeasy Ales & Lagers will cease operations indefinitely, the company announced Friday. The Bayview taproom served customers for the last time on Thursday evening.

"The last year and a half, we've been looking for options to secure additional capital to keep us going, and unfortunately we couldn't come to terms to make that happen," Brian Stechschulte, the brewery's public relations and media director, told Inside Scoop. "It left us with no choice but to cease operations."

The future of the brand will now be up to the company's primary creditor. That creditor, though Stechschulte would not name it, we believe to be Union Bank, which financed the company's 2015 expansion -- an upgrade from 15,000 to 90,000 barrel capacity estimated at around $7.5 million. (According to Stechschulte, Speakeasy produced around 35,000 barrels of beer in 2016.)

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Speakeasy has been a San Francisco mainstay since 1997, and those shifty, neon-lit eyes are a fixture of our city's bar windows. In a recent debate among Chronicle food staff (topic: What are the four iconic Bay Area beers?), food editor Paolo Lucchesi nominated Prohibition Ale: "The amber ale was the Bayview brewery's first beer and it still holds up," he wrote.

Now's the time to hoard your favorite ales. What remains of Speakeasy's inventory, which is sold in several states, has been sent to distributors and will be sold through.

The brewery is still hoping for a lifeline. "The unfortunate thing about this whole situation is that we don't have direct information from the creditor," said Stechschulte. "There's a whole bunch of situations we can speculate about – obviously what we would like is to see the brewery and the brand."

When asked whether the increasingly competitive nature of craft beer in the Bay Area may have played a role, Stechschulte said he believes it was not the primary cause. "It's certainly hard to deny that that played a role," he said, "but we had a lot of things going on that led us to the situation today."

Stay tuned in the weeks ahead as we learn more about the fate of Speakeasy.

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